"Apple may be taking some of the burden of assembling the new iMac off Chinese supply partners by performing parts of assembly in the U.S., as a number of newly-purchased standard units are showing an 'Assembled in USA' notation usually reserved for made-to-order machines." Cool. You'd think we'd have more information on this than the article contains, but alas.

"Assembled in USA" aka Still made in china, just modified in the US to what you ordered.

That's actually forbidden by the FTC's rules. You can only say "Assembled in USA" if a substantial amount of the actual work on the product was done in the country. Simply importing a bunch of parts and slapping them together isn't sufficient to qualify, and will in fact get you fined.

That's actually forbidden by the FTC's rules. You can only say "Assembled in USA" if a substantial amount of the actual work on the product was done in the country. Simply importing a bunch of parts and slapping them together isn't sufficient to qualify, and will in fact get you fined.

At the risk of nitpicking, the article quotes some FTC text that mentions a "substantial amount of assembly work".

So it's still mostly about putting the parts together, which is AFAIK not exactly the largest amount of work that goes into building a computer.